and next door, in a tidy but overcrowded bedroom, the abbé chassin, without any of the marks of his office, sat and listened to the babbling of an old spinster lady who was to terminate an uneventful and singularly respectable life as the messenger of destiny to not a few people.
the heavy curtains were pulled back from the side of the small fourposter by which the priest sat, and the candlelight fell soft and steady on the old, old blanched face within the neat capfrill, itself scarcely whiter than the visage it surrounded. on the waxlike countenance, amid all the signs of nearing death, was the imprint of that masterfulness which sometimes descends with age upon a certain type of old lady. and mlle magny was talking, talking continuously and pitifully, her eyes fixed, her shrivelled fingers pleating and plucking the edge of the sheet in the last fatal restlessness. those hands were the only things that moved.
“i ought to have had it ready . . . but i did not know in time, i did not know! all these years to have had it in the family, and not to have known that it was there! but perhaps i shall be in time after all—they cannot have come back from the chapel yet, surely. but i must be quick, i must be quick! . . . and when the bride gives round the sword-knots and the fans to all the fine company i shall offer my gift to the young duc. but i must be quick . . .”
and the withered hands, abandoning the sheet, began to fumble over the bed as if searching for something.
the abbé bent forward and laid one of his own gently on the nearer.
“cannot i help you, my daughter—cannot i do something for you?”
the eyes turned a moment; the brain, deeply absorbed in the past though it was, seemed to grasp this intrusion from the present, even to the pastoral mode of address.
“you are a priest, monsieur? that is good—that is good! yes, you can open this casket for me,” and she made as if she held it. “and inside you will find the wedding gift for the young duc de trélan—but you must be quick, quick! they will be back from the chapel! . . . ah, i cannot find the key—i cannot turn the lock! my god, if i should be too late after all! mon père, mon père, help me! . . . but, mon père, you are doing nothing!”
the abbé looked round in desperation. he could see nothing that at all resembled a locked casket among the little treasures of the old lady’s room, the pincushions, the images of devotion, all the prim collection of a blameless lifetime. but in a moment the struggle with the imaginary lock came to an end, and as the tired hands relaxed a smile crept about mlle magny’s indrawn mouth.
“how handsome he is, monseigneur gaston!” she said in a tone of admiration. “my dear lady will be proud of him to-day! they will dance to-night after the wedding, and i shall see it all, as my lady wishes. but none of the fine ladies there will have given the bride such a gift as i shall give the bridegroom, though i am only his dear mother’s maid. . . . but why does the abbé not bring it to me? when the bride gives round the swordknots and the fans——”
“madame,” gently interrupted the priest, “if you will tell me where your gift is, i will bring it to you instantly.”
a look of cunning swept over the dying old woman’s face, and a faint sound that was like a chuckle came from her lips.
“ah, no, i have hidden it well!” she replied unexpectedly, “hidden it nearly as securely as the treasure of mirabel itself. you will not find it in a hurry, clotilde!”
who was clotilde, wondered the priest? the niece with whom she lived, probably. but what was this about a ‘treasure’ in mirabel?
“to think,” went on the old voice musingly, “that the precious paper was all these years in cousin fran?ois’ dining-room, and all those scores of years before that, since the time it was stolen. and all the dead and gone duchesses might have had the rubies to wear. i might have clasped the necklace round my sainted lady’s own neck. now the new duchesse will be the first to put it round her pretty throat.”
the priest gave a little shiver. still that wedding eight-and-twenty years ago! . . . since then the pretty throat of which she spoke had known a very different necklace . . . but of the same colour . . .
“but if you have hidden the rubies, madame,” he hazarded, bewildered between the ‘treasure’ and the ‘paper,’ the ‘gift’ and what was concealed, “you will not be able to give them to the bride.”
“it was not i who hid them!” responded mlle magny impatiently. “it was the first duc, in the days of mazarin, who hid a great store of money and jewels at mirabel. and no one was ever able to find them again. stolen . . . hidden . . . hidden . . . stolen . . . they make a beautiful couple, and when monseigneur de paris has married them and the nuptial mass is finished. . . .”
a long pause. then the old lady whispering, “sainte vierge, how tired i am!” clasped her hands on her breast. the abbé got up and bent over her. her eyes were closed, and he heard her murmur indistinctly, “mater amabilis, virgo prudentissima, grant me soon to see my sainted lady!”
to be on the brink of so important, so long-lost a secret—too late for it to be of use . . . yet, after all, perhaps, not too late—and to be baffled at the very moment of discovery! when such an extraordinary coincidence had brought him, of all men in the world, to this bedside, for its possessor to take the secret unrevealed out of life with her! it was hard!
yet, as m. chassin was a priest, he put away regret, and tried to think only of the needs of this soul about to pass through the great door. mlle magny had had the last rites, that he knew. was the moment come for the commendatory prayer? he slipped his fingers round her wrist. but the pulse, though feeble and irregular, was not at the last flutter. and slowly, as if his touch had roused her, the old lady opened her eyes again. the look in them was different; meeting it, the priest knew that she was no longer wandering in the mists of nearly thirty years ago. she was back in the present; so much so, indeed, that she was capable of astonishment at seeing this unknown man in peasant’s dress bending over her—more, of resenting it.
“who are you, monsieur, and . . . what . . . what are you doing here?” she demanded, in a tone which, if scarcely more than the frailest of whispers, yet conveyed some of that masterfulness which was written on her face.
“i am a priest, madame, an insermenté, and m. charlot, your neighbour, brought me here, at your niece’s desire.”
“clotilde always . . . takes too much upon herself,” said the thread of a voice in a tone of displeasure. “i have already had . . . the last sacraments.”
“yes, madame,” assented m. chassin, realising that mlle magny’s recovery of her senses was not advancing him much. “it was not for the purpose of administering you that i came.”
her look asked him what his purpose was.
“because, my daughter, you were speaking of—mirabel.”
“nonsense!” retorted mlle magny quite sharply. “i am not in . . . in the habit of . . . discussing my past life with strangers!”
“you have been ill, madame,” said the priest gently. “and has not mirabel something to do with your present life too?” then, being a man who knew how to wait, he took his seat beside her again, and exercised this power.
“have i been wandering?” asked the dying woman, suddenly turning her eyes upon him.
“a little, yes.”
“i have been very ill . . . and they tell me i shall not get better. . . . is that so, father?”
“it is what i have been given to understand, my daughter. but you have made your peace with god.”
“yes,” said she. “but there is something else that i desire to do . . . before i die . . . yet god knows how i am to do it.”
the priest bent forward. “god does indeed know, my daughter, and it was doubtless he who sent me here to-day. you wish, do you not, to give into the hands of the duc de trélan a paper now in your possession concerning a treasure which has been for many years hidden in his chateau of mirabel.”
a flush rose in the ivory face. “i talked of that?”
“of that—and of a wedding at mirabel.”
mlle magny put a trembling hand over her eyes. “indeed, you must forgive me! . . . all these years i cannot forget it—the lights, the jewels, the beauty of that couple, my lady’s happiness. for i was tirewoman, mon père, during many years, to the duchesse eléonore, the dowager duchess, a saint on earth. god rest her soul! she only lived for a short time after her son’s marriage.”
the priest nodded, as one who knows already. “i, too, have cause to say ‘god rest her!’—and the paper you spoke of?”
“what paper?” demanded the old voice, suddenly suspicious again.
“the paper containing the secret of the hoard hidden at mirabel in mazarin’s time, which has come into your hands, madame, and which you were wishing that you could have given to the duc de trélan on his wedding day so many years ago.”
there was silence from the bed. “well,” said the old lady at last, with more animation, “if i told you . . . all that . . . i may as well tell you the rest.”
and slowly, with pauses for breath, she told him how the duc de trélan of mazarin’s day, implicated in the rebellion of the fronde, and not knowing which party would finally triumph in that kaleidoscope of civil conflict, buried gold and jewels in his once-royal chateau of mirabel and made a memorandum of the hiding-place for his son, then away fighting with condé. the duc himself had to flee before mazarin’s vengeance and died in exile; mirabel was for a space confiscated, and when the next duc was reinstated the treasure could not be found. the memorandum of its hiding-place had been stolen by the late duc’s steward, who offered to sell it for a large sum to the successor to the title. suspecting a hoax the latter refused; yet, as was not difficult for a great noble in those days, he procured a lettre de cachet against the offender, who dragged out the rest of his life in prison. before his arrest, however, he had placed the memorandum in the hands of a friend; but the friend never took any steps to utilise it, and merely preserved it in such a manner that it was to all intents and purposes lost—for he pasted the parchment, face downwards, against the back of his wife’s portrait. probably, said the old lady, he was waiting till the man who had confided it to him came out of prison; but this the steward never did, and a short time before his death in captivity his friend, mlle magny’s great-great-grandfather, died too. and there, gummed against the picture of the flourishing bourgeoise dame of louis xiii.’s day, the parchment had remained for nearly a hundred and fifty years, till, some two years ago, on cousin fran?ois’ death, the portrait had come into mlle magny’s possession, and the old lady herself, in examining it, had lighted on the parchment, and realised of what irony fate was capable.
“ah, if only i had had it earlier!” she concluded wistfully. “what a gift to have made my sainted lady, who was sometimes pressed for money for her charities, since, like all the saint-chamans, both her husband and her son spent their means royally. and now these two years that i have had it it is useless! where is the duc de trélan now? alas, we know where his wife, the duchesse valentine, went! . . . and what is mirabel to-day?”
“no, madame,” said the priest, as the voice ceased exhausted, “two years ago you could have done nothing. but to-day, as heaven has so ordered it, you can give that paper to the duc de trélan, if you wish.”
she turned her sunken eyes on him again. the lustre was already fading.
“and how is that, if you please?”
“because i am . . . in close touch with the duc. if you commit the paper to me he shall have it before—before i am many days older.”
“but—if he is still alive—he is an émigré . . . has been an émigré for many years!” objected mlle magny incredulously.
“nevertheless i am in close touch with him.”
the failing eyes of the sick woman searched his face—that commonplace visage out of which looked neither good nor evil. it was difficult to read.
“i have nothing but your word for that,” she said, while suspicion and a wistful desire to trust him strove together in look and tone.
the priest put his hand into a pocket of his embroidered vest and pulled out an ornate rosary of ebony and silver. taking one of the silver paternoster beads between his finger and thumb; he bent over mlle magny and held it near her eyes. “can you see what is engraved on that bead, madame? it is not a sacred emblem.”
the old lady put up her feeble hand and tried to push his a little further off. “you are holding it too near, mon père,” she said irritably. “i am not so blind as that. . . . it looks like . . . it is very worn . . . yet it looks like a bird of some kind, with wings outspread. what is that doing on a chaplet? is it on the rest of the beads?”
he showed her. “victor, cardinal de trélan, in the early days of the century, seems to have had a strange fancy for his family crest on his rosary. there is his monogram on one bead. that bird, madame, is the trélan phoenix, and the present duc gave me this old rosary at my ordination.”
instantly she seized his hand. “the trélan phoenix! let me look again! yes, it is, it is! ah, to see it once more after all these years!” and as the priest relinquished the chaplet, the duchesse eléonore’s tirewoman, almost sobbing, put it to her lips.
the abbé waited, and after a moment she turned on him moist eyes and said, puzzled, “but . . . but . . . i seem to remember . . . ordination . . . the cardinal’s rosary . . . it was surely to the young duc’s foster-brother, a breton peasant, whom i never saw . . . that it was given . . . when he took orders?”
“you remember quite rightly, madame. and i am that foster-brother, that breton peasant, pierre chassin.”
had he suddenly revealed himself as louis xviii. or the comte d’artois the devoted old spinster could scarcely have shown more emotion.
“god be praised! god be praised for this mercy!” she quavered. “his foster-brother! yes, i remember hearing from my lady all about your mother. six years before i entered her service it was . . .”
“—remembering then, madame, what i too owe to your lady of blessed memory, and to the duc, who, as you probably know, had me educated and gave me a cure on his estates in the south, you may trust me, may you not, with the document?”
“yes, indeed!” returned the old lady, and there was no shadow of doubt in her tone now. but the shock of joy, her devotion to the great family with whom her life had been bound up, and the advent of this man who, if he were not himself the rose, was almost a graft from the tree—all these seemed to have benumbed her faculties, for she lay quiet, tears of weakness and happiness stealing from under the closed lids. presently she said,
“he is in france again then, the duc?”
“i am afraid i cannot tell you that, my daughter. but, on the faith of a christian and a priest he shall have the secret in his hands very shortly.”
“he will not be able to make use of it now.”
“who knows? and if not now, when happier days come, perhaps. if he can make use of it, it will be of immeasurably greater service to him to-day than it would ever have been a quarter of a century ago. for this much i can tell you, madame, that, wherever he is, he is fighting for the king.”
“as a trélan should!” she murmured with a smile. but the smile had gone when she added, “and the terrible fate of his wife, the duchesse valentine?”
“it broke his heart,” said the priest briefly.
“my lady was spared much,” murmured mlle magny. she passed a shaking hand over her eyes. “so much blood . . . and mirabel deserted. . . . are the candles going out, mon père, or is it my eyes? n’importe—you can still find the parchment . . . that little closed frame by the mirror yonder. if you open it you will know the face.”
he did. it was a little pastel drawing of the duchesse eléonore, his patroness, wearing the widow’s weeds in which he best recalled her. he came back to the bed holding it.
“it was to have been buried with me, that little picture . . . it still shall be. clotilde knew how fond i was of it—but she would never have guessed anything else, poor fool . . . i took a lesson from my forbear . . . tear off the paper at the back, mon père.”
m. chassin obeyed, and as he peeled off the pinkish, speckly paper recently pasted there, a piece of yellow parchment doubled up against the real back of the picture was disclosed. it was folded in four, and on it was written in brownish ink the single word, “mirabel.”
“open it!” said the voice from the bed, grown very weak now.
the priest obeyed. as he unfolded the parchment with no very steady hands, his eyes were greeted with a sort of rough sketch-map of some complexity, underneath which was written, in a crabbed seventeenth century hand:
“plan de l’endroit dans mon chasteau de mirabel où j’ay fait enterrer plusieurs milliers de pistoles et divers parements de pierreries de feu ma femme, à cause des troubles sévissant en ce royaume.” and he caught sight of “item, 10 sacs contenant chascun 2,500 pistoles . . . item, un collier de rubis des indes fort bien travaillé . . . item, une coupe en or ciselé dite de la reyne margueritte” . . .
the whole was inscribed “pour mon fils hault et puissant seigneur gui de saint-chamans, marquis de la ganache, vicomte de saint-chamans,” and signed, “fait par moy a mon dit chasteau de mirabel ce six avril de l’an mil six cent cinquante-deux, antoine-louis de saint-chamans, duc de treslan.”
“this is indeed——” began the priest as soon as he could find voice, when, glancing off the parchment, he saw the change which, in the brief space of his study of the document, had come over the face on the pillow. mlle magny had used her last reserve of strength over this matter; it was gone now, and she was going too.
“promise me, father!” she gasped out as he bent over her.
“i promise you, my daughter, as i hope myself for salvation!”
the drawn lips smiled. “i can say my nunc dimittis . . . bless me, pierre chassin!”
he raised his hand. “benedicat te . . .” and passed straight on to the “go forth, o christian soul . . .”
by the end she was unconscious, and a quarter of an hour later, the weeping clotilde on one side of the bed and the proscribed priest praying on the other, mlle magny, her last thoughts on earth occupied with the house of trélan, went through the great door to meet her sainted lady, leaving on its hither side the secret of mirabel to bring about results undreamt of.
